This is a question I have been asked on a number of occasions recently and is the main concern of most new website owners.

There are a lot of different things which affect the number of people that find your website. These include marketing, content creation, publishing schedule, social media and website construction to name a few.

As a web developer it’s my job to construct websites which are easy to find and share. In the past 6 years of doing this I have been learning as much as I can about the subject so I can build websites that will help my clients projects succeed.

In January I had a lot of fun building the website for MacPherson Landscape Photography and seeing it successfully launch and attract over a thousand visitors in it’s first month.

The project had been delayed all year due to lack of time so Maureen and I took decisive action to build and launch the website for January 1st 2014.

To make this happen we used some specific tactics which I am going to share on the Creative Transmissions blog in the hope that they will inspire more creative individuals to break through the not-enough-time barrier and let their work out into the online world.

This project was different as Maureen is not one of my regular website development clients – but also my girlfriend. As the web developer this certainly made communication and goal setting easier but it also added its own set of requirements for success and of course for me the stakes were high!

What is Content?

Content refers to the information and media that your visitors come to your website to see. This could be articles or reference material you have published, music, photography, video, spoken work audio such as a podcast, a live audio or video stream or even online games.

Recent improvements in the technologies that make up the web have made all these different forms of media possible and relatively easy to publish on your website. While this opens up many exciting possibilities it is still important to do some planning before you start uploading.

How to Decide What Content to Publish

If you are thinking of setting up a website you most likely already have a main topic in mind. The most successful websites are usually focused around providing information about a single topic or theme. The more relevant your content is to the main topic the more useful it will be to your visitors.

A good place to start is with the purpose of your website. Are you trying to educate your audience about something with your website? If so each post or piece of content should increase your audiences knowledge of your topic. Trying to sell a product? The information you post should explain how your product will help your target audience.

What Your Audience Wants

Knowing your target audience is also a big consideration when deciding what type of content to post. Are you trying to reach academics and experts that need detailed reports? Perhaps you are reaching out to people with busy lifestyles who would prefer audio content they can listen to in their headphones while travelling or working.

If you can put yourself in your visitors shoes you have a better chance of creating content that they will enjoy, find useful and share.

Organize Your Content

Organizing your website into a number of sub-topics will help your visitors find the information they are looking for more easily as the size of the website grows.

Deciding on the organisation and types of content you will provide on your website is something you should do before you start talking to a designer or start building yourself. The content will determine the structure of the website.

For example a simple website about a particular musician could be organised into the following sub-topics:

Biography

Songs / Releases

Gigs

The website can then be divided up into a number of sections for each sub-topic, which will form the basis of the website’s structure.

Once you have your sub-topics you will then find it helpful to decide what format you would like to prevent your information in. For our musician this could be:

Blog Posts announcing upcoming gigs or reporting on previous ones

Image galleries of events

Streaming or downloadable audio recordings of songs or concerts

Streaming or downloadable video of songs or concert footage

Audio or video interviews

A tutorial on how to play a particular songs

A shop for buying merchandise

Knowing the types of media and format of the content will help you or your designer come up with a structure and layout for your web pages.

Do I Really Need To Plan My Content?

If your website is going to be anything more than a personal journal then you should spend some time planning your content. It takes time to write articles, record audio and make videos so why not make sure it’s time well spent. If you want you website to be a useful resource that hits the spot for your target audience you should make sure everything you post is relevant to your core topic.

Planning your content in advance will help you to set up a website that is:

Useful to your visitors by providing material relevant to the website’s main topic

Well structured and easy for your visitors to navigate and find what they want

Constructed in a way that allows you to publish information and media in the most appropriate formats for your visitors

An added bonus is that the more relevant and well organised content your website is, the higher is will appear in search engine results when people search for your topic in Google and Bing.

Put Your Content Plan Into Action

Once you have a plan for the content you are going to publish you will find yourself coming with ideas for new content all the time. At this point its time to spring into action and get creating. It’s never to soon to start.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect design, the perfect name or even a website at all. If you are working with a web designer or developer then the more content you can provide them with have in advance the easier it will be for them to create a website that works for you.

When you launch your website the more relevant content you have the better it will look to your first visitors. With a good plane you can start creating now with the confidence that everything you produce will help you and your target audience achieve their goals.

Setting up a website can appear to be daunting if you have never tried it before. There are so many options, tools, services and website builders that it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Understanding what you need to get started online boils down to the five essential building blocks which I will be explaining in a short series of articles. The first of these is the your domain name.

What Is A Domain Name?

Your domain name is the name that uniquely identifies your website on the Internet, such as “google.com”, “amazon.co.uk” or “wikepedia.org”. You can also use your domain name as part of your email address to give a consistent and professional impression to your contacts.

A good and meaningful domain name will help your visitors discover your website and will increase your chances of being displayed high up in the search results on Google or any of the other search engines. A good domain name means more visitors.

Registering a domain name is a good place to start with your new project. The process of choosing a name will help you clarify your ideas, the cost is minimal and taking your first definitive action towards making you idea a reality will give you the excitement and momentum to move forwards.

Choosing Your Domain Name

To be effective your domain name should be or contain the title of your website. For example Creative Transmissions has creativetransmissions.com as a domain name so it is obvious to both Google and anybody searching for the business that this is the requested website.

If you are providing a product or service from your website you should think about what your potential customers would be searching for online and try and include some of the words they might used in your domain name.

For example if you are a photographer specialising in landscape photography you should used the words “landscape photography” in your domain name such as: macphersonlandscapephotography.co.uk.

The Suffix

The part of the domain name at the end is called the suffix, for example “.com” “.org” or “.net”.

If you offer any kind of commercial service should choose .com (short for commercial). This is the easiest to remember domain suffix so will help your customers remember you. If you are running a non-profit organisation .org would be appropriate or if you are running a local company you might like to use a national level domain name suffix such as .co.uk.

Domain Name Pricing

New domain names are inexpensive to register as the only cost is administration – you are paying for the name to be reserved for your use. Top level domains such as .com are more expensive and are usually around £5 – £15 where as national level domains are usually cheaper and registration for two years is usually less than a .com name would cost for one year.

Sometimes companies will offer you a free domain name which includes their own business or organisation name, for example “yourbusinessname.blogger.com”. These are not true domain names and are not given a high priority by search engines. At the end of the day they just give more exposure to the website you register with instead of your own. In addition you are not usually able to use these in you email address. For maximum exposure, control and flexibility your domain name should include only the words you choose and nothing else.

Getting Started

Registering your domain name is usually your first step to setting up your first website. The main points to consider are:

A domain name should clearly describe what your website is about

You will be more likely to get more visitors if your domain name contains the words your visitors are likely to search for in Google.

I see amazing talent and dedication all around me – powerful art, writing, photography and music being made but so often forgotten, stored, or filed away on a hard drive where no one can be inspired by it. This is why I started Creative Transmissions.

One particular aspects of our creative culture has always fascinated and inspired me more than others. This year the websites, tools and services offered by Creative Transmissions will be focusing on helping spread the unstoppable creativity of the electronic dance scene.

The decreasing cost of music production and DJ equipment and software combined with the ability to share music with a global audience has accelerated musical evolution like never before.

In the online world the communities, music hosting sites, music distributors and social networks are a reflection of the happy chaos of the dance scene. An ever increasing number of services, technologies and techniques are available to promoting the artists, performers and events at the core of electronic dance culture.

For some reason this creativity has not filtered through to the web as much as expected. While there are some amazing music project out there (like Be@TV for example). Many DJs, producers and clubs lack even their domain and website – the hub of any online marketing strategy.

As a person that understands how the nuts and bolts of how the web works and who studies the benefits it has for creative ventures I am drawn to help people use technology to elevate their creative work and bring it to those that appreciate it.

This year’s plan for Creative Transmissions plan is to make it easy for new fans to find your music.

Creative Transmissions is currently working to develop tools, components and services for websites which are a solid foundation for a successful music and event promotion.

If you have a suggestion that you think will help move this mission forward or if you offer complementary services I’d love to exchange ideas with you.

If you would like to work with Creative Transmissions to develop a website that will be the solid core of your musical presence on the web or would like assistance in taking your existing venture to the next level just drop me a line on the contact page.

In my previous blog post I made the point that clarifying the goals that you have for your website is an essential step in making sure the website you create is a success.

It is also important to be aware that the goals you want to achieve with your website are sometimes different from the goals of your visitors.

If you keep your visitors happy they will be more likely to browse your page for longer and hopefully decide to take the action that fulfills your goal as the website owner.

For instance, a common website goal is to collect names for a mailing list. This is not usually on the top of most visitors list of things to do so to achieve this goal we can take an educated guess as to what might the visitors goal might be.

Going back to the example I used in my previous post for site advertising a festival, you (as the festival organizer) may want to build up a mailing list of interested people that you can contact about future events. However perhaps your visitor only wants to find out when their favorite band is playing at the next festival.

To reconcile these goals you could offer a downloadable program which will give the visitor the information they are looking for. This information will probably not be available until close to the event so you can give the user the option to enter their email address so they can receive the program via email when it is available – which also adds the email address to the mailing list.

This fulfills the visitor and the website owners goals at the same time so everyone is happy.

To maximize your chances of making your website visitors happy, try taking some time to think about all the possible goals that your visitor might have other than your own goals for the website.

If you or your web designer can think of a way of combining the action that achieve your visitors goals with the action that achieves your own goals you are much more likely to create a successful website.

In this post I’d like to suggest the next step to take while you plan your new website.

Once you are clear on the overall purpose of your website it’s time to think about how the website will achieve this purpose. What will your website help your visitors do to make this happen?

Usually you can identify one or more outcomes or goals which if achieved will fulfil the purpose of the website. For example, say you wanted to set up a website for a music festival.

The overall purpose of a music festival website is most likely to make the event is a success so the attendees have a great time and the festival organisers and acts can get paid and go on to put on or play at more events.

How could our website help achieve this?

It could:

Encourage more people to come by make the festival look good.

Announce the line up of acts playing at the festival to attract the fans of those acts.

Explain how to get there, where to stay and what to expect so that no one is put off by the logistics of attending the festival.

Sell tickets online. The easier it is for the visitors the more likely they are to buy.

If the website achieves these goals then tickets will be sold and the website will have done it’s job.

So now that we have a plan of how the website will achieve it’s purpose we can use this to decide how to structure the website. Ideally each page of the website will help the visitor achieve one of these goals. In our example a simple solution could be:

A home page that uses photography, video and audio of a previous event to show people what a great time they will have

A page with a detailed line-up and perhaps a programme

A page giving directions, accommodation information and other general informatio

A page to sell tickets.

Once you have this structure you can continue to work out what information and media would work best on which section of the website.

Clarifying your website goals in this way will help you take your overall purpose and turn it into a plan for an effective website.

Note: This is a simplified example which I hope will help you plan your own website. There is of course a lot more that a festival website could do for the organisers and the attendees and I will be writing more about this in future articles.

If you liked this article please share it with anyone who you think might benefit from reading it and feel free to comment if you have something to add.